Emmy-Winner Wayne White is First Riverfest Artist-in-ResidencePosted on by jblackburn • 0 CommentsWichita Festivals, Inc.(WFI) and Harvester Arts announced today they are partnering with Ulrich Museum of Art and Wichita State University School of Art, Design and Creative Industries (WSU SADCI) to create an artist’s residency in collaboration with Riverfest 2015 with Emmy and Billboard award-winning artist, Wayne White.

Among other events during the 10-day residency, White will work with local artists to build several large-scale puppets for Riverfest’s Safelite® AutoGlass Sundown Parade and conduct public mask-making workshops for anyone interested in walking with him in the parade.

White, who sports a full dark beard with major white patches over his chin, is being coy about what the puppets will represent, preferring to let paradegoers be surprised.

“I love history, so I’m taking my ideas from Wichita’s pioneer past to make it personal,” says White, who created a giant sleeping head (with surprise moving parts) of singer George Jones for Houston, a “cubist cowboy rodeo” for Oklahoma City and a complete cartoon city for Roanoke, Va.

“I know about your cowboy heritage and airplane industry and was told about some of the festival icons like Admiral Windwagon Smith and the Keeper of the Plains. I was also fascinated by (ax-wielding prohibitionist) Carry Nation, but I haven’t finalized anything,” White says, adding that one road he doesn’t plan to go down is the yellow brick one leading to the “Wizard of Oz.” It’s been done enough, he says.

PHOTOS: Artist Wayne White works with local artists to build puppets for the Wichita River Festival

Wichita River Festival artist in residence Wayne White and a gathering of local artists are building giant parade puppets for the Sundown Parade

— http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article22153359.html

Wayne White’s Artwork Is As Mad And Humorous As HimselfBy SEAN SANDEFUR • MAY 29, 2015

There will be a cattle drive in downtown Wichita tonight as part of the Sundown Parade at Riverfest. Los Angeles-based artist Wayne White has created lively steers, cowboys and other familiar characters from Wichita’s history. KMUW’s Sean Sandefur got to see the artist at work…

Who is Broward County named for and what would he look like if three-time Emmy Award-winning artist Wayne White made a giant puppet of him?

Find out this summer when White creates a supersized puppet of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward during a 10-day residency at the Art and Culture Center. For his first exhibition in Florida, the Los Angeles-based artist will create a gallery fun house that also features his witty “Word” paintings, new drawings from recent artist residencies in Key West and Captiva, and a collection of whimsical puppets made from found objects.

Cool, As a Ticking Bomb

For 11 years, Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian have co-owned Western Project in Culver City. Together they exhibit work that’s consistently challenging and boundary-breaking, representing artists like Tom of Finland (before he was MOCA-acceptable), Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose (whose work is the best kind of shocking), and Ron Athey (who Benjamin accurately describes as “Promethean”). Kermanikian’s unflappable youthful insight compliments Benjamin’s experience, and their dedication to the art and artists they love is palpable every time they talk shop.

Benjamin isn’t like most gallery owners. His arms are covered in tattoos and his attire is often more leather bar than Moet VIP lounge. He’s as queer as can be, a walking assault on normalcy, and that’s just part of what makes him so compelling. He’s also been an artist, professor, art dealer, gallery director and gallery owner. For nearly half a century he's been part of LA’s cultural identity, making him a kind of griot, always ready with a story about something people forgot, don’t know, or refuse to talk about. That’s why I’m waiting for him in a Silver Lake cafe to ask for a story or two.

Cliff Benjamin at gallery with artwork, photo by Joe Schmelzer

Artillery: Tell me how LA has changed in your lifetime and what do you think about the art world today?Cliff Benjamin: I never think of this as a competitive business. I didn’t when I was an artist, and I don’t now as a gallerist. Most gallery owners don’t come from a teaching or a working artist background. I taught off-and-on for six or seven years, and I always liked teaching. I think teaching is more about giving people permission. So I think my background lets me go into a studio, and if an artist is stuck, I know. I get it, and we can talk. I also like that I get to help artists be self-sufficient. I personally know how hard it is; being an artist is the hardest job in the world.

What do you think has been the biggest change in the LA art world?The biggest change is the illusion there’s a big collector base here. All these galleries move here, and they think they’re going to do this and that. But they can’t make it. Unless you’re from here, you just don’t get it.

Why is that?LA is so much about lifestyle and unless you understand that endemically, you won’t understand this climate, this culture. If Pace Gallery couldn’t make it—well… .

What do you think people fail to remember about LA’s art world? Who gets left out?LA has zero memory. So, for instance, the Getty’s PST show had ad nauseam talk about the Ferus Gallery. You would think there would have been an equally huge chapter on Nick Wilder. He was barely mentioned! He was enormously influential. He showed Nauman, Twombly, Alberto Burri, John McLaughlin, David Hockney and so many more. And Nick had these famous openings and crazy lifestyle.

Carole Caroompas, Before and After Frankenstein: The Woman Who Knew Too Much: The Couple Who Had No Umbilicus, 1994, Private Collection, Los Angeles, California, courtesy Western Project

So why do you think he was so absent from PST?Because it just didn’t have the same buzz as Ferus. Ferus was a press machine.

In terms of artists, who do you think deserves more historical attention?I will say that PST did a great service to the artists from the late ’60s and ’70s who haven’t been part of the general dialog. But I’m going to be biased. It infuriates me that Carole Caroompas is not in the same dialog as Mike Kelley. Her work is just as crusty, incisive, beautiful and crazy as it ever was. She’s never flinched. She’s taught at Otis for almost 30 years now, and she’s been as influential a teacher as John Baldessari. But because she’s a woman—there have been so many women and people of color who haven’t been put in that hopper. It’s tragic.

In so many ways, there’s so little honesty and kindness in the art world. That’s what we need to cultivate. To do otherwise just seems like too much work to me. I mean, if you’re interested in power then maybe, but not me.That drive for power, for being cool, is just a cover-up, a hungry ego. The whole notion of being cool is a ticking time bomb. Being cool is the booby prize. It really is.

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De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition by Los Angeles-based painter Dion Johnson, entitled Chromatic Momentum. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from January 8 – February 14, 2015. An opening reception in the presence of the artist will be held on January 15 from 6-8 PM.

Dion Johnson does stuff with color that other artists don’t even dream of, much less deliver. The L.A. painter makes color fat, like the belly of the Buddha, at least as it appears in many sculptures of the half-naked sage, whose beaming smile and twinkling eyes suggest a kind of enlightenment that is whole-bodied, pleasurable and an end in itself. Johnson also keeps color taut, like a sail in a gale, stretched to its physical limits in gracefully bulging curves that are elegant, functional and forceful. There’s a sharpness to Johnson’s tangy slice of the spectrum, whose astringent kick gets echoed in the crisp edges of the snuggly abutted shapes his colors take. Their sizzling intensity is similarly keyed up by the lovely weirdness Johnson generates with their out-of-whack juxtapositions, which should be queasy, even garish, almost vulgar, but somehow come off as even more gorgeous for their oddball precision.

Despite the evocative heat that radiates from Johnson’s radically saturated paintings, there’s an implacable cool to their bands and swoops of color: a type of synthetic iciness that avoids the sting of nature’s coldness, the harshness of psychological withdrawal and the anaesthetized deadness of emotional detachment in favor of the ravishing extravagance of an unnaturally enhanced palette—a range of tints, tones and temperature that all seem to be on especially friendly terms with neon and plastic and all manner of artifice, the sexier the better. The razor-sharp lines pin-stripers apply to customized low-riders also lie behind Johnson’s compositions, in which the thinnest sliver of some strange tertiary expands gradually to become a kind of slender penmanship that then morphs into an aerodynamic shape with so much muscularity that it seems to be three dimensional: an idiosyncratic building block locked together with others in ways that make them feel as if they’re adrift—freely flowing left and right, up and down, forth and back, as if they were not merely breathing but abuzz and ahum and apulse with a rhythm no less palpable for its silence.

For his first solo exhibition, local artist Joe Lloyd offers large, sunny, intensely layered abstract paintings at Western Project. These roughly symmetrical compositions of sharply angled shapes are rendered in clear, bright colors that intersect and overlap in fevered, sometimes psychedelic combinations.

Each painting is built up from many, many layers of geometric designs. Some were initially worked out on a computer, but the paintings are clearly the result of an iterative, hand-driven process. One layer gives way to the next but remains visible, refracted through translucent scrims of paint or asserting itself as texture: the lumps and bumps of a previous idea. Such imperfections are countered with an overall sense of symmetry, making for images that feel grounded in geometry but not ruled by it.

This attitude, as well as the jovial clarity of Lloyd’s palette is reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series. But where Diebenkorn’s hard-won geometries feel like an artist groping toward some kind of resolution, Lloyd’s seem to revel in discontinuities and fissures. His struggle is not to wrest geometry from real life or vice versa. His paintings have a thoroughly delightful, freewheeling character open to the idea that a systematic approach might not add up in the end.

For 2 1/2 hours, Sheppard and Hattington were closed inside a transparent and metal box measuring 48” x 48” x 13” and attached 10-feet above the ground on the facade of The Arcade building at 936 1/2 Mei Ling Way (across from New Dragon Restaurant and down from Hop Louie’s Bar). The two performers repeatedly changed restricting positions within the box while caressing one another’s bodies in a public display of affection. A water hose was attached to the box which kept the couple’s entangled bodies wet, and transformed the box itself into a steamy sauna dripping with a constant pitter-patter of rain.

The light box was pre-existing signage that had at one time been used as advertising, left to sit vacant for years. For pink box Sheppard and Hattington stripped the box of its electrical, replaced brittle and aged plexiglas with new vibrant fluorescent panes, and painted the structure pink. The performance within then became something video-esque and surreal to the eye, contrasting with the environment and landscape.

pink box was video-taped from two different angles: from close-up inside, and; from street-level outside the box (videography by Jaime Scholnick and Sally Coates).

The sixth edition of L.A.’s premier performance art gathering will present over 40 performers, distributed across a host of Chinatown galleries and public spaces on the 26th of July between 12 Noon and 10 PM.

Marrying left and right brain sensibilities, abstract painter Joe Lloyd seamlessly melds beautiful imperfections and errant geometries. An impressive emerging talent and 2012 MFA grad of Claremont Graduate University, Lloyd creates complex, architectonic works. Inspired by the limitations of mathematical geometry to capture the variance of organic forms, the artist uses geometric motifs in his paintings loosely, rather than formulaically, to invoke the observed discrepancies found in landscape, objects and architecture. Delineating space intuitively with line, texture, color and edge, Lloyd explores pattern as an aggregate of imperfect symmetries. His deceptively concise work conveys an energetic painterliness rarely associated with geometric abstraction. Joe Lloyd: New Paintings, on view July 26-Aug.29 at Western Project, is the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and a must-see debut. Gallery director Cliff Benjamin says of the highly anticipated project, “[Joe Lloyd’s] work reflects the dynamic qualities of L.A. It is razor-sharp, unexpected and unapologetically beautiful.” Who knew that math could be so interesting? Western Project, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A.,310. 838.0609, western-project.com

The Conversation is a contemporary art-centric podcast, which includes both the Conversation 3-Way, in which artist Michael Shaw and two guests/co-hosts discuss temporal as well as evergreen topics, and the original format, featuring one-on-one exchanges between Michael and artists, collectors, curators and dealers.

The Conversation is a contemporary art-centric podcast, which includes both the Conversation 3-Way, in which artist Michael Shaw and two guests/co-hosts discuss temporal as well as evergreen topics, and the original format, featuring one-on-one exchanges between Michael and artists, collectors, curators and dealers.

Western Project is proud to present the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles artist, Alec Egan. An MFA graduate of Otis College of Art and Design, the artist spent the last year on a new body of work, Luminous Opera. Egan’s language is aggressive and visceral, based in questions of authenticity and art historical myths and clichés. Reframing Van Gogh’s pictorial language, moreover, using it as a trope with his own subject matter, Egan creates a muscular vocabulary with dense, excessive surfaces akin to Anselm Keifer and Leon Kossoff. His application of oil paint is a constructive process; images built into large scale, tactile landscapes and portraits. They are a fecund and material totality. Egan’s subjects are both personal and historic; familial portraiture to Van Gogh’s fields and trees. His depiction of Van Gogh’s green parrot is transformed into a double edged allegory; now a diving acrobat, or a descending Icarus figure? Using commercial poster art or Star Trek references, Egan rides a confluence of humor, tragedy, nature, and Pop influences to investigate ideas of masculinity, beauty and culture. His works are a deliberate statement on the ecstatic wisdom of making pictures; a belief in the power of the artist, and a declarative howl.

Egan graduated from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013, Kenyon College in 2007 with a BA in creative writing and is a published poet. He has shown at Sebrof International Gallery, New York, ROOM, in Hartford, Studio 2507, Portland, Box Eight Gallery and Poor Dog Studio, in Los Angeles, among many others. Additionally, he has participated in multiple residencies nationally.

Vertigo Art Space, Denver Colorado - May 2 - June 14, 2014

The Conversation is a contemporary art-centric podcast, which includes both the Conversation 3-Way, in which artist Michael Shaw and two guests/co-hosts discuss temporal as well as evergreen topics, and the original format, featuring one-on-one exchanges between Michael and artists, collectors, curators and dealers.

Wayne White was invited to York College for a month to construct a large-scale, site-specific art installation in Gallery Hall on the 3rd Floor of Marketview Arts, located across from the Central Market at 37 W. Philadelphia Street in downtown York. Below you will find a video interview with Wayne by Christine Baker for Penn Live as well as Wayne's photo-journal of the process. For more information see the York College of Pennsylvania website HERE

Western Project is proud to present in the West Room, the fourth solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist, Nancy Riegleman. Glass Tongues is an installation made up of one hundred suspended glass sculptures, accompanied by two ornate and complex ink drawings. This work continues her interest in the human body and its possibilities:

“My work orders chaos precisely, shaping it and pulling it to a place of its own. By isolating the tongue, my aim was to unhinge it from its shelter, allowing it to perform itself. In this way I am addressing the body¹s confinement and its attempts to press past its own limitations. The objects and drawings are simultaneously part of and apart from myself. They are physical, but reach beyond the body¹s perception of itself. In this way, this exhibition rarefies the oddity of the body, drawing the viewer in to experience it in multiple reiterations.”

Hung from the ceiling by nylon filament, the glass objects form a cloud-like structure, reflecting and refracting light. The clear glass material appears both liquid and ephemeral. At once elegant, the overall effect is both buoyant and uneasy. The hand-blown tongue shapes are each unique in contour and shape, measuring up to two feet long. The fragility of the material is multiplied by the quantity hung in space. As body parts, they suggest voice, language and communication, yet deteched from their source. In a group they convey a chorus, a performative group subject to the flow of air currents and light. Historically, the artist has used her own body rhythms to create images, but now eternal rhythms and conditions make the ‘body’ perform. Riegelman has invented a silent symphony of objects; a floating formation of silent declarations: one hundred different tongues in concert alone and as an entity.

Riegelman is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles and the Louvre. She has shown in Paris, France, Bombay, India, Seoul, Korea, at Art Center College of Art and Design, Pasadena, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Long Beach Museum, and many other galleries and museums through out the United States.

Art often gets talked about in terms of the freedom it delivers — to those who make it and to those who look at it. For Brian Porray, the idea of freedom is too high-minded, idealized and easily corrupted by zealous self-righteousness.

Insubordination is what the young, Las Vegas-born, L.A.-based painter understands, inside and out. It pours forth in torrents from his electrifying exhibition at Western Project, a no-holds-barred carnival of optical kinetics, whiplash spatial shifts and head-spinning highjinks that explain why some see Porray as one of the best of his generation.

Titled |*/N0_N3W_M00N\*|, his third solo show in Los Angeles is jampacked with 30 paintings. Each of the variously sized panels and canvases is jampacked with so much visual information that it is almost an exhibition unto itself, especially when contrasted with much of the wan stuff being made today, stuff that makes good old-fashioned slacker art look overly ambitious.

Porray takes the anarchistic impulse at the heart of slackerdom to the next level — and beyond. His cacophonous collisions of pulsating polka dots, asymmetrical Xs, malformed stars, tweaked diamonds, squeezed grids, shaky spirals and goofy doodles jostle among one another to form improvised arrangements that are anything but orderly. On the threshold of being out of control, each of his compositions is all the more potent for its precariousness.

Staid paintings these are not. Imagine 500 people pressing themselves into a subway car built for 150 and then being happy to be on board. This gives you an idea of the pressure Porray brings to his paintings, whose density invites second, third and fourth looks.

Paradoxically, his manically collaged constellations of everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink make you slow down and look closely. They create space for contemplation. Not your father’s serenity, but something more charged and sharply focused.

Porray’s cut-and-paste compositions transform collage into a visual force field of antipodal energy. Ad hoc order holds chaos at bay as democratic principles open onto anarchy at its best: freewheeling, boundary-busting, limitless. Insubordination never looked better -- nor served such socially useful purposes.